This paper explores, on the one hand,
the impact of the status of the unity of science in the emotional processes that
format scientific practice and, on the other hand, how certain feelings grant a
sense of unity to the practice of sciences.

First, we draw a scenario where we show
simplistically the development of the idea of unity of science. We characterize
the different moments of the philosophical perspective about the unity of
science by choosing certain examples from the history of science to illustrate
the different periods. Then, we describe the emotional identity of the different
historical periods identified by identifying the mood of the historical period
as well as the emotional character of the scientist of the various examples
given.

Second, building on previous research,
we introduce the triad “love, faith and hope” as fundamental emotions of
scientific practice. We characterize such emotions as complex by explaining how
these feelings should be seen as the result of complex response/meta-response
emotional processes. Then, we show how the mark of surprise in scientific
discovery can also be understood as a complex emotional whole. Finally, we
characterize the triad of emotions for the different periods identified aiming
at showing how the triad has changed and developed and, simultaneously, how it
seems to have remained the same.

We establish a conclusion in two parts.
First, we summarize the insights of reflection showing how the unity of science
both mirrors and formats the sense of unity of science. Second, we lay down some
of the consequences of taking into consideration the emotional identity of the
unity of science by tracing its impact in the interpretation of history of
science, and how it may serve as a guide to critically evaluate the current
practice of science as well as education for science.

In this talk we will
bring to light the role of faith in beliefs in the development of the scientific
knowledge and also present, in a systematic fashion, its presence in various
scientific fields in its various historical moments.

Since the Ancient
times faith in certain beliefs has conducted and unified the scientific thinking
by permeating all of science. One of the unifying beliefs is the one about the
harmony of the Universe. The impact of the faith on this belief is so
overpowering that its influence can be seen even on the perspective upon
mathematics: the beauty and elegance of mathematical expressions is supposedly
an undeniable evidence of the harmonic nature of the Universe. However,
sometimes faith in certain beli

efs causes controversy and, on
occasions, even
violent arguments among scientists, as it is seen with the reductionism in
biology or the vitalism in chemistry.

No matter what the
impact of beliefs

is, it is certain that they have, both in an open fashion as
well as hidden one, contributed to create and maintain the search for knowledge
in the different areas, conditioning not only the development of sciences as
well as the teaching of the same scientific fields. The paper will use certain
examples to explore in which ways the force of believes formats scientific sense
of unity.

The
Cultural Sciences and their Basis in Life. On Ernst Cassirer's Theory of
Cultural Sciences

Christian
M(Humboldt-University, Berlin, Germany)

Evolutionary
Psychology and the Unity of Science

Luís
Moniz
Pereira(Centre for Artificial Intelligence /CENTRIA, New University of Lisbon,
Portugal)

The
XXth Century Physics and the Unity of Science

Rui Moreira
(Faculty of Sciences, Lisbon University,
Portugal)

Niels Bohr was the responsible for
the introduction of the complementarity principle in physics. This attempt
pretended to stress the existence of an irreducible irrational residuum that,
following Harald Høffding, the professor of philosophy of Niels Bohr, had
emerged in the domain of psychology. He himself tried to extend it to the domain
of philosophy. What Niels Bohr has done was to extend this irreducible
irrational residuum to the domain of physics. This was an attempt of a kind of
reductionism of physics and philosophy to psychology. In fact, following Harald
Høffding, every kind of thought should be psychologically possible. The laws we
find in the domain of psychology cannot be violated in every level of the human
thought activity.

Utopia is in the
horizon.
I get two steps closer, and it moves two steps away. I walk ten
steps and it is ten steps further away.
No matter how much I walk, it will never be reached.
So what is utopia for? For this it serves: to walk.

Eduardo Galeano

Does it make any sense to pursue unity of
science, after the failure of the Vienna Circle’s project of unification of sciences, and in an era in which the growth of knowledge continues to be primarily the product of specialized research (even if many important scientific advances have always come up as the result of conceptual and methodological borrowings and spill-overs across sciences)? The idea of unity of science seems to face insurmountable difficulties. Not only the possibility of unification of different sciences is widely regarded as a lost cause, lack of unity is also the most common situation within disciplines. It is against this backdrop that I will argue in this paper for
unity in diversity, claiming that Science is plural, but that the utopia of unity
should be kept at the back of one’s mind, even if just as an aspiration, an unreachable ideal which leads us to transgress disciplinary boundaries (in an overall context of “dialogical encounter” across disciplines), and which keeps us looking for the
connections and the totality.

My point is that, against the polar contrast between ever more specialized, fragmentary (closed) sciences and the reductionist projects of unity of science, sciences are to be construed (and developed) as
theoretical open systems, with emergent properties irreducible to those of any one of them or to whatever basic characteristic, language or method/logic of inquiry one may consider. By an open system I mean a structure with connections (as any other system) where, in contrast with a closed one, boundaries are semi-permeable and mutable – this way enabling many and various in-fluxes as well as out-fluxes and contamination from other systems – and the constituent components as well as the structure of their interrelationships are not predetermined (a more detailed elaboration will be provided in the paper, in which the works on the meaning of open systems of Sheila Dow and Victoria Chick, e.g. Dow, 1997 and 2002; Chick and Dow, 2005, are central). Emergence, in turn, is meant here as a basic feature of a stratified, multi-layered (understanding of) reality. A stratum (an entity or aspect) of reality is said to be emergent, or to possess emergent properties, “if there is a sense in which it has arisen out of some ‘lower’ level, being conditioned by and dependent upon, but not predictable from, the properties found at the lower level.” (Lawson, 1997: 176), thus turning the higher-level stratum irreducible to the lower-level one.

In order to illustrate and discuss the above mentioned tension between specialization and unification, and how the alternative view of
Sciences as Open Systems may make a difference, attention will be given to Economics (and to its relations with other social sciences). Two issues, in particular, will be explored and the contrasting views of mainstream economics and the “Economics as Social Theory” project highlighted: (1) the language of mathematics (overwhelmingly thought as the required language / instrument of reasoning in Economics) and (2) the rational choice model and the
economics imperialist’s claim that it “provides the most promising basis presently available for a unified approach to the analysis of the social world by scholars from different social
sciences” (Becker, 1993).